Monday, January 25, 2010

No time for blogging today! Germaine Gregarious and I have to go back in time to rewrite the history of the Project Mercury capsule on January 31, 1961. (Like I am going to let a chimpanzee do an orangutan's job? Puh-leeze.) In the meantime you can watch this swell student video done by Sarah Mead to the song "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" by the Magnetic Fields.("I've got wheels, and you wanna go for a ride!")

3 Comments:

An human and an orangutan, in a space capsule, are about to be launched into space.

The orangutan is instructed to put on headphones and follow the instructions every time a green light flashes.

The human is instructed to do the same, except every time a red light flashes.

So they're launched into space, and the green light flashes. Following his instructions, the orangutan jettisons the second stage. The green light flashes again. The orangutan trims the orbit of the capsule.

The entire time, the green light keeps flashing, and the orangutan keeps pulling levers and pushing buttons - adjusting the capsule's flight path, taking measurements of the upper ionosphere, releasing pods with experiments, and the like.

The human is getting really frustrated, but finally the red light flashes! So the human eagerly puts on his headphones and hears, "Feed the orangutan."

My dad, who worked at NASA at the time, says that he could have snuck me in the capsule in place of Ham. So, I could have been the first human in space, but I figure dad might just now be getting out of prison if he had pulled it off. :-p

Or maybe it happened that way until you came back in time and switched me out.

Dr. Zira, I must caution you. Experimental brain surgery on these creatures is one thing, and I'm all in favor of it. But to suggest that we can learn anything about the simian nature from a study of man is sheer nonsense. Man is a menace, a walking pestilence. He eats up his food supply in the forest, then migrates to our green belts and ravages our crops. The sooner he is exterminated, the better. It's a question of simian survival.